1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to systems that produce computer-generated forms, such as standardized documents that must be filed with government agencies, legal documents, employment-related documents, and the like. More particularly, the invention provides an expert system-based approach for prompting users for information and generating forms that avoids the need for hardcoded graphical user interface (GUI) software.
2. Related Information
Companies today endure an enormous paperwork burden, much of it in the form of standardized documents that must be submitted to government agencies or shared with other entities such as credit bureaus. As one example, insurance companies seeking to have their insurance agents licensed in several states must fill out different application forms for each state, wherein the different forms often require supplying redundant and irrelevant information. As another example, an employment action such as hiring a new employee may require filling out information on separate forms for health insurance, retirement plans, tax filings, and state and federal administrative filings. As yet another example, food manufacturers that package food in containers must report how they sterilize food and file documents with the Food and Drug Administration, wherein a separate form is required for every combination of product, style, and package type.
The multiple forms that must be completed for the various transactions of often contain redundant and irrelevant information. For example, a basic employment application may require supplying an employee's name, date of birth, social security number, and marital status. A separate health insurance form may also require this same information, plus the name of a preferred doctor, a spouse's name, and a spouse's social security number. Requiring that an employee specify his or her name on the separate forms is duplicative. Moreover, if an employee's marital status was indicated on the employment application as being "single," entering a spouse's name and social security number on the health insurance form is irrelevant and unnecessary. In other words, certain information on the various forms may be irrelevant or already known based on an earlier entry supplied by a user entering data.
One approach for solving some of the aforementioned problems is to write customized computer software that presents a user with a computerized version of each paper form, thus facilitating data entry. The user interface could be tailored to resemble the paper form, or it could be different but still generate a paper facsimile of the original paper form with the user-supplied information printed thereon. In an employment setting, for example, an employee could enter data on separate computer-generated screens and have the computer generate a populated employment application, a health benefits form, and income tax witholding form.
There are several problems with the foregoing "brute force" computerized approach to forms processing. First, redundant and overlapping information from different forms will not necessarily be eliminated. For example, requiring the employee to re-enter his or her name, once for each different form, is unnecessary. Second, irrelevant information is still presented to the user. For example, if an employee enters his marital status as "single," the user may still be presented with an entry space for entering "spouse name." Finally, the software (typically written in C, COBOL, or other high-level language) must be customized, coded, and retested any time there is a change to a form. This recoding and retesting incurs high labor costs and requires that companies adopt proprietary systems that can quickly become obsolete or vulnerable to a software vendor who goes out of business. Even so-called "context-sensitive" user interface techniques, assuming they could be applied to forms processing applications, would not address the foregoing problems. For these and other reasons, reliance on custom software to handle data entry for prompting users for information and for printing the forms is undesirable.